Love is a gathering of minutiae. Stones, dirt particles, the waxing/waning light, goat’s milk, chamomile,and honey. I am learning the excruciating art of attention, my small gift of sight to the world. The wider the world, the smaller I seem. This smallness is relieving. Concerns, like the self, are pebbles to be tossed into the sea.

This is love, I think, to hold a name carefully between the teeth, to hold without swallowing.

A thousand men could not keep me warm. My soulmate is the totality of the teeming earth.

I know now that the past tense is a cruel deception. Anything real is now and forever engraved on our bodies.

And here I am before the sea, being crushed again beneath the foam of former things. But is anything former when we speak of love or pain or any great and breaking thing?

We are bathed in the same sky...We are bound by the same atmosphere which bifurcates our bodies. Somehow, this distance between our feet is a shared belonging.

Nothing is lost here, in this place before language, before longing. The love is the same, after all. Only the names change.